From Rudyard Kipling's July 1935 speech before the Canadian Authors' Association ...
Mercifully, it is not permitted to any one to foresee his or her literary election or reprobation, any more than it was permitted to our ancestors to foresee the just stature of their contemporaries, whose shrines and former dwellings you are now in the process of visiting ...
The things that you will see here, and the atmospheres you will realise, are not, as aliens might regard them, archaeological curiosities or ineffective echoes out of a spent past. Whether they be the work of men's hands, or men's souls, they bear witness to the instinct—it is more than tradition—the immemorial racial instinct towards unbridled expenditure on matters material and spiritual for sheer joy of the exercise.
They are proof of our land's deep unconscious delight through all ages in her own strength and beauty and unjaded youth.
That same headlong surplus of effort and desire goes forward along other paths to-day. But our eyes are held. Like the generations before us, we cannot perceive among what new births of new wonders we now move. And all these things, out of our past, in our present, and for our future, are yours by right.
They are doubly yours, since the dominant strains of your blood draw from those twin races—French and English—which throughout their histories have been most resolute not to be decivilised on any pretext or for any gain.
If on your journeys some of you feel inclined to faint by the wayside, you have my deepest sympathy, for it was given to me once to see Canada en bloc. I had known portions of it, of course, many years before, but this was one prodigious sweep from Quebec to Victoria and back again.
Through three amazing weeks it was my turn to be shown things—to listen to prophecies which, within the next ten years, fell short of the facts, and to feel the moral pulse of a land and a people free as their own airs, and yet set in most ancient and sane practices of justice, honour, and self-control.
I tried to grasp all these things because they were just as much mine as everything here is yours. Not till long after my return did the significance of them begin to break in upon me. Then my experiences and impressions clarified and arranged themselves, and as I sorted them out in my head I found that I had the key to them all the time in my heart.
It will be the same with you on your return, because one's own heart is the best place to store the few things in life that really matter.
Read the rest here.
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